Heeling Powers : Heart Gets Workout and Passion Makes Itself Heard in Flamenco Lessons

Lilia Llorens launches her beginning flamenco class with a crisp order: “No talking and no castanets!” The students like their castanets, they like the clicking and they love the clacking, but dutifully obey.

Now, it’s time to warm up. Llorens gives her marching orders, just do it: a hip jut there, a leg thrust here. Flamenco is an art form of precise movement, and everything has to be limber, nice and hot for some nice and hot steps. Most students look serious. Some look distracted. Wistful about those castanets?

“Children,” Llorens asks, “why do you think we have hip exercises? To look sexy?” The class shouts, “No!” “To have fun?” The class yells, “Yes!”

Llorens continues: “You know, I’m going to punish you this morning. You don’t hold back, we won’t hold back.”

And away they go, on a deafening tear through a series of toe-to-heel taps called a taconeo that seems to last a painfully long time. They start in the back and move to the front, following Llorens as she staccato-strides to the mirror covering an entire wall in an Orange Coast College dance studio. By the time it’s over, most have a sweat going, faces pink, hair damp.

As Llorens explained earlier: “Flamenco is a very passionate, very intense dance that appeals to people for many reasons. One of the big reasons in this, my beginner class, is the exercise. By the time I’m done with them, they’ve all had quite a workout.”

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Llorens, who has a style that’s at once both loose and no-nonsense, has taught a novice and an advanced class at OCC since 1988, usually on Saturday mornings. Beginners come first, the devotees come later, each in two-hour sessions. Llorens is a purist, a Cuban native who studied classical Spanish dance as a girl and sashayed into flamenco naturally.

Teaching it came naturally, too. There’s little opportunity to make a living in Southern California performing flamenco, generally considered the national dance of Spain, and passing along what she knows was one way to keep her obsession alive.

“It really is an act of love--you do it because you can’t get it out of your system,” Llorens says. “I think people find it intoxicating. I know I did. When you start listening to flamenco (the up-tempo guitar music accompanying the dance), you listen to it everywhere, the car, at home, everywhere. I’m lucky because it’s become a part of my life.”

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As for her students, Llorens divides them into categories. The advanced ones are like her, transfixed by flamenco’s beauty. Beginners may just be curious about the Spanish culture that inspired the dance, hope to become experts or want to raise their heart rates in a different way.

“Sure, this is like an aerobics class to many,” Llorens says, “but you get a lot more out of it in the long run.”

For one thing, Llorens likes to talk about flamenco’s history, which is somewhat vague but, as she pointed out, usually traced to “ancient minority groups, the Jews and Moors, who were persecuted and used flamenco to express their suffering.”

That theory is supported by many so-called “flamencologists” who agree that several of the cantes, or styles of flamenco songs, were influenced by Moors who occupied most of Spain for eight centuries. Another view ties the dance to Gypsies who had been forced into the Spanish military service in the 17th Century while regiments were fighting in Flanders. Flamenco is Spanish for Fleming, or a native of Flanders.

Most people, certainly Americans, usually equate flamenco with the erotic, or at least the tempestuous. Tourists in Spain are expected to attend an exhibition the same way New York visitors flock to Broadway musicals. What they tend to see are steamy solos that give way to steamier duets, but Llorens stresses that that’s really a “commercialized” interpretation.

“It’s always a solo dance. The couple dancing developed out of a need to make the choreography” for a stagy show, Llorens explains. “You have to remember where it came from; because of its origins (coming from) minority suffering, it was something individuals did as an expressive, very personal statement.”

Even if she wanted to focus on duets, it would be difficult. About 95% of her students are women, and most of the techniques she teaches do look more feminine than masculine. Llorens feels that men are “generally too inhibited” to learn the form but does believe that Latinos are more open to flamenco, probably because of cultural familiarity. That seems to be true in the beginning class, where most of the few men are Latino.

Rudy Cortez, 27, of Santa Ana says he was drawn to the dance while spending time in Spain. He briefly studied it there and, when returning to the States, tried to find a class in Los Angeles, where he works as a sales manager. No luck until he heard of Llorens.

“It’s pretty amazing to me that there aren’t more classes, but this is a very good one. I’ve been going to it for three years,” Cortez said after the session. “I like it because it’s so therapeutic . . . and because it makes me feel very sexy.”

And what else? “Look at all the pretty girls! Wouldn’t you like to be in a class like this? I keep telling my friends to show up.”

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Anaheim resident Gloria Ramirez, 60, took up flamenco for the workout but was soon charmed by the music.

“You really have this sense that the music is inside you. I feel that when I’m dancing, I really am part of that music,” she says, then pauses. “And I have to tell you, it really does leave you feeling passionate.”

Minerva Larsson, 48, of Costa Mesa agrees. “It’s the sexiness, absolutely. It’s a very erotic dance, for both men and women. Once you get the steps, it releases both the feminine and masculine (impulses) in people, and that is great fun. . . . It can get exhausting though; we really do go at it.”

Llorens provides short breaks every now and then, and one comes after all the technical moves, especially the fierce taconeo. Up next are the castanets, picked up eagerly by many in the class. One woman, wearing a long red skirt that flows over black velvet Spanish dance shoes, gushes to a friend, “Oh, I just love this part. . . . I like making noise.”

That may be true, but Llorens still has some advice as the students take their places, snapping the wooden clappers as they go. “Breaking the line of the arm is not good,” she says. “And another thing, keep your tongue in place.”

Discipline and routine, Llorens adds, are essential, no matter who complains. “If you don’t want to bother your neighbors, or your husbands, just stick a sock (inside the) castanets. Take them to the bedroom with you, to the bathroom.

“You spend a lot of time in there, don’t you? And just remember, ‘practice, practice, practice.’ ”